My organs twisted and jabbed.
But she doesn’t even care, I pleaded. Here I waltz in, smelling of sex, and she doesn’t even ask his name. Maybe she already knows. Maybe Ian had texted her from the train. Maybe I was a cute toy to them, maybe they thought it was sweet how I got all mealymouthed around him.
My stomach cinched. A cold film of sweat coated my arms.
It’s okay, I coached myself. It’s okay. You messed up a little, but it’s okay. I hunched over the toilet, mouth open, waiting. Cat watched with hazel eyes. Eventually I began to feel a bit melodramatic, and slunk back to the couch, totally defeated, unable even to vomit up my mistake.
* * *
—
For days I edged through the world as if a sudden move might slosh out my guts. Nausea burbled in me, dread and sickness, a hangover that didn’t end.
It wasn’t that I wanted him to get in touch so we could see each other again. No; nothing like that. I just wanted him to give me some clue about how he was feeling so I could know how I should be feeling. Of course we were never going to do it again. I had done it just to touch the darkness inside me. To know again the girl I was trying daily to summon to the desk. But we should just confirm this plan. We should agree on it. He should text me to tell me he wasn’t going to text me anymore. God, how I wanted it.
“You still feel sick?” Lacie surveyed me slumped on the couch. “Maybe you have a stomach bug or something.”
“Maybe. I honestly feel worse.”
“You need tea.” Without waiting for an answer she slipped into the kitchen. I heard water rushing into the teapot, and then the click and hiss of a burner. “God, who was this guy?” she called. “I didn’t even know you were dating anyone.”
She appeared in the doorway, a twist of ginger root in her hand, a quizzical expression on her face. Did she suspect? It was rare for Lacie to reference as conventional a category as “dating.”
“I’m not. He was just this guy at the bar. He works at Credit Suisse.” Shame thudded in me. On top of everything, I’d betrayed Franklin.
“Jesus. I hope he paid for the drinks, at least.” She disappeared into the kitchen, and soon there came the steady whack of ginger dicing, a sound I had heard many times over the past few days. Her kindness was making me ill. I couldn’t take much more of it.
* * *
—
That night she went out. Still no word from Ian. I paced around the apartment, looking for the millionth time at all Lacie’s things, telling myself I wouldn’t finish the tub of caramel gelato in the freezer, and then finishing it. As day became night I began to wonder if they were fucking right now. God. I finished off the blackberries, the brie, the sourdough.
Eros has always been structured by waiting. Anne Carson has something to say about this. Roland Barthes too. Such elegant, beautiful things! They almost make you wish you had a little bit of waiting to do. Real waiting’s not like that. Real waiting’s murder. Waiting! A half dozen times an hour I snatched at my phone, clicked it on, and growled. The very air hummed. Whatever I was doing—staring into space at my desk, staring into space on the daybed, staring into the blue-white space of the fridge—it was blackly bordered by the fact of waiting.
Torture: every minute that Ian did not text me confirmed that he was not thinking about me. Eventually my very actions seemed defined by this implicit indifference from him. It was the opposite of imagining someone is watching you. Someone was not watching me. Not wondering about me. Was probably totally absorbed in deeply meaningful art-making, and/or looking deeply into Lacie’s eyes as they made passionate love. Regardless. Not thinking about me.
All I could do was think about him.
“Let’s go home,” he had said.
“Stand on my feet,” he had said.
Under the soles of my feet, his cool skin and brittle tendons. “Oh, you’re so wet,” he had moaned, and bent me over the bed. Slid into me. The bone lust, the revelation. I played that tape again and again. I wore that tape out.
It was hot, my senior spring. The week they announced my play had won, the dogwoods bloomed and wilted, bursting whitely out one Monday and sagging from every branch by Friday. Tulips bloomed and shriveled; the forsythia had just one day of glory. All around me there were brown flowers.
Play rehearsals began, official rehearsals, for the staged reading that would happen downtown. I rode the R3 from Swarthmore to the city, back and forth, over and over. My face close to the glass, I watched scenes from my childhood slide by. Always, when we crossed the bridge that spanned the creek, I craned my neck to see the dappled water scattering light.
One pale sunny afternoon on the train I heard my character’s voice. I heard it. Eve. She was speaking to me; she was telling me why the garden was paradise, and why she had to leave. From my bag I slipped my notebook and began to scribble, desperate not to lose any of the words as they fell into my mind. Eve’s monologue. That was what my play needed. I was an idiot—a fool—not to have seen it before.
It was my first taste of that particular intoxication, the hours of drudgery at the desk rewarded with a song you simply wrote down. Eve told me how good it felt to want things. To take, the way a man took. Going for it, going into it. Wanting something. Desiring. Desiring and not giving a fuck. Just like a man. I wrote and wrote, and when I brought the pages in the next day, neatly typed, the director read the lines with his mouth agape. “This is incredible,” he told me. “You’ve really got something.”
* * *
—
Even though I had been literally running along Yale Avenue to flag down a car, the EMTs insisted on strapping me to a board. Over and over they shouted, “Your head! Your head! Do you want to be paralyzed?” I kept asking about Leo and they kept telling me my friend was fine.
As they carried me to the ambulance, hot pricks of tears stunned my eyes. The pink Philly sky, light-polluted and crossed by black branches, was like a Japanese woodblock print. It was so beautiful I thought I must be dying.
But at the hospital the young intern said I was fine, maybe a little whiplash, but fine. Lucky, really. No, she couldn’t tell us anything about another patient, not even if we had been in the car together. By then my mom had arrived—she had come barreling into the ER, black fleece over a yellow nightie, flip-flops wetly kissing the linoleum—and when she saw my eyes roll back at the doctor’s intransigence she slipped out, somehow found Leo’s mom, and learned that he had already been released. Head wounds: they bleed a lot even when they don’t go deep. Concussion? I asked. Maybe, the nurse shrugged. He was knocked out. But he should be fine.
Well. We drove home in a tentative silence, as if cringing and waiting for another blow. In the front hall my mom hugged me extra-close and I said, “Ah! Ah! My neck!” and she said, “Oh, my sweet baby girl.”